I've been asked to give a talk about our new house at the launch ceremony for the formation of Salisbury as a Transition City on 27th June 2015, at the Banqueting Suite, The Guildhall, Salisbury, some time between 13:00 and 18:00, as part of a number of events that afternoon. The event formally launches Salisbury as a Transition City (http://www.salisbury...sitioncity.org/), as a part of the Transition Network (see here for more details: https://www.transitionnetwork.org/ )

The Transition Network seems a good organisation to get involved with, as it seems mainly driven from the bottom up. it's the people in society that want to see us reduce energy use, reduce dependence on fossil fuels, reduce CO2 emissions and generally change the way we think about our environment. It's not driven by central or local government, but does have a surprising amount of local government support here.

It's associated with the Green Open Homes initiative (some may remember that we opened our doors as a part of this last year: http://www.ebuild.co...re-green-doors/ ). Generally there seems to be a lot of support locally for this, and lots of people seem interested in way to reduce energy use (probably as much for money-saving reasons as any others!).

They also form a network that organizes supporting submissions for turbine applications in areas the bulk of them have no connection with, regardless of the situation local to the planning application. We have copies of emails sent out using Transition Towns mailing lists asking 'members' to "swamp" the comments pages of planning portals in support of planning apps for turbines.

That sort of behaviour compromises their integrity in my view.

One person who contacted me had made enquiries about getting involved in the movement but was told that membership took unqualified support for wind in any location ("Because there's no such thing as a bad location") as a given.

They also form a network that organizes supporting submissions for turbine applications in areas the bulk of them have no connection with, regardless of the situation local to the planning application. We have copies of emails sent out using Transition Towns mailing lists asking 'members' to "swamp" the comments pages of planning portals in support of planning apps for turbines.

That sort of behaviour compromises their integrity in my view.

One person who contacted me had made enquiries about getting involved in the movement but was told that membership took unqualified support for wind in any location ("Because there's no such thing as a bad location") as a given.

Trust me, if that happens here then I shall make a sharp exit and do all I can to prevent them just becoming another lobby group.

From my experiences so far, I have the feeling that here this is very much driven by active local communities, made up from "ordinary" people, not activists in the conventional sense of the word.

The main theme seems to be sharing ideas and educating people. So far we've taken part in the Green Doors event and were amazed by the number of visitors, and the range of questions we had. At a guess, we had over 80 visitors, with most finding it hard to understand that you could build an ordinary looking house that didn't really need any heating. We were showing visitors around in groups of about 6 at a time, and opening the doors in between to cool the house down a bit (this was last Spring). We quickly learned that one of the most powerful ways of illustrating how little heat the house needed was to get everyone to note the temperature in the hall as they came in, then note that the MVHR fan speed would ramp up after around ten minutes to cope with the increase in temperature from a few hundred watts of heat from the visitors, and ask them to check the temperature again. It was a powerful demonstration that suddenly adding a few hundred watts of extra heat from a group of visitors was enough to warm the house up slightly pretty quickly.

The most powerful way I've found of demonstrating the CO2 saving is by comparing our house to a typical house of the same size. In CO2 terms, our house is roughly th same as growing over 40 mature trees on the plot instead of having a house there, in terms of the amount of CO2 the house effectively "sequesters" by being a net zero CO2 energy generator. This tends to grab people's attention far more effectively than just quoting numbers.

If anyone tried that on me as a member of Transition Town Kingston's energy group then I'd pointedly check out their opinions on 'no such thing as a bad location' for nukes and GMOs, even though I am in favour of all of them.

I just politely passed the buck with an FoE guy who was asking for support for X even though FoE holds faith-based-anti-views on nukes which might be better than X (both of which I favour) under some circs, etc.

Yeah, I took issue because until I became aware of what was happening via the 'leaked' email, leaked, incidentally, by one of their members who'd had the email and was so angry at its implications for the movement that she passed it on to the person who lives closest to the projected site. It left a bad taste in everyone's mouth.

They also disputed the AECB's press release on biomass, the one that kicked off the thread on the other place, because the AECB was also wrong to emphasize demand reduction when wind was free and the technology readily to hand.

How much time would be saved, invective spared, heart-ache avoided, lives saved if more people realised that? Not to mention the the time saved on pointless Radio 4 interviews where false dichotomies are peddled.

I was involved with a local Transition movement. It worked well at first when there was a good leader, she managed to get a better turn out than the local politician.
Sadly she went out of the county and the movement degenerated into a bunch of hippies that wanted to change the world by walking backwards and blindfolding people 'so they can explore the environment better'.
If I got involved again, and I might as I like the concept, I would take the 'economic' route. Show then that with sensible planning and management, money can be saved. Hard thing to do as some of them think that 'money' is an evil thing.

Well, this kicks off this coming Saturday afternoon at the Guildhall, Salisbury. I've attached a copy of the programme if anyone is in the area and wants to turn up. Following my brief talk I'll be around with stuff about our build and plan to stay there most of the afternoon. It should be on radio/TV, as I've been asked to do an interview for the BBC (presumably just the local lot, BBC Radio Wiltshire and BBC South).

The BBC have just been on the 'phone and have decided to do an interview at the new house this morning, so that should be fun. It'll be easier to actually show them the stuff that makes it energy efficient, rather than just talk about it.

Just to finish this off, the event seemed to go well. I had a long talk with our MP, John Glen. Nice enough chap but really not at all up to speed on energy saving issues and had clearly been knobled by lobbyists at some point, as he kept quoting that housebuilding in Wales had rapidly slowed down when building regs energy saving measures were improved. The fact that he'd worked for Eric Pickles for two years didn't inspire confidence, either.

On the positive side I managed to give him a copy of Paul Buckinghams's excellent paper on the appalling standard of new builds and offered to show him just how bad new builds were with an evening of thermal imaging. I think he may well have accepted this challenge, so come the colder weather I will remind him of it and see if we can go around some of the local new estates that I know to be poorly insulated. I'll have to simplify things to get the message across, so I will have comparison images of our house to show the differences and problem areas with new builds. He seemed up for this, but time will tell.

I had a lot of feedback after the talk, and was gratified to find that there were a lot of people, of all age ranges, wanting to cut their energy use. One has a problem that someone here may be able to offer help with, She's a lovely lady, living on pension support, who has received some bad advice in the past (like fitting electric underfloor heating in a Victorian flat would be an energy saving measure!). She's switched on and knows the benefits of insulation and energy saving ventilation, but is obviously in need of grant support for the higher cost items. I suggested that a single room heat recovery ventilation unit may help with her condensation problem, as currently she's had to use a dehumidifier to cope with the extra condensation from added insulation.

I've encouraged her to join this forum, as I know some here have fitted these single room heat recovery ventilation units with some success, She really needs grant funding assistance, too, if it is available. If she joins, please welcome her and offer her the best advice you can.

I can report that I had a long conversation with another passive house architect in the area, who may join our community. He already has a good grasp of the problems and issues and is keen to design and build more passive houses. He's experienced the same sort of problems with some suppliers (notably Munster Joinery, as usual) as others, but if he takes the time to join up here I reckon he'll be a real asset.

Finally I spoke for a time with a lovely lady who has clear ideas on the design style of house she wants and seems to have been convinced by my presentation that it should be a passive house. I mentioned the Bicester self-build programme in passing, and she may be interested in that. I know that one or two here have experience of the Bicester scheme, so if she joins her perhaps you could take the time to explain how it is working out.

Sadly I didn't get to have a gripe at the council, but given the general good humour of the event this may have been a step too far. The only signs of friction I saw were between some on the environmental activist fringe and John Glen, our tory MP, and that's no less than I'd have expected. My talk was apolitical and I made it very clear that I did not support any political party, including the Greens, Friends of the Earth etc. I think this was popular with the majority, although at least one wind turbine supporting green came over to re-educate me.....................

JSH, the local NHS may be prepared to prescribe a single-room MHRV to help the hard-up lady to maintain adequate heating and avoid condensation (and respiratory problems). Worth asking if there is a "Warm Homes" programme running locally.

Rgds

Damon

PS. Had an unpleasant run in with a random smart-meter person operative on the streets today: like your council officer I'm doing my best to ensure that he realises that thuggish behaviour and attempted intimidation doesn't work... %-P

Thanks very much Damon, that was exactly the sort of useful lead I hoped might come from this community. Listening to this lady's story and the run-around she'd had from everyone from the energy companies to the the public sector agencies that are supposed to help, I couldn't help but feel she had been very badly let down. She's a capable person, who fully understands what she needs, she is most certainly not a "scrounger", and wants to have better control of her energy use, without being ripped off.

If she can replace her dehumidifier with a single-room MVHR unit then I'm pretty confident that she'd save a significant amount of energy. The electric UFH will need to be addressed, as that's another part of her energy consumption problem, but this is going to be a process of taking things one step at a time.